Trekkies Unite
Going into a dimension where no other interactive multimedia exhibit has gone before, Star Trek The Tour embarks on a five-year excursion around the U.S. this month.
The exhibit makes its first landing at the Queen Mary Dome in Long Beach, CA, on Jan. 18. It will disembark in February for stops in San Francisco, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago, Detroit and three other locations yet to be charted during 2008. The tour will hit 40 cities over the five years.
Fueled by the legacy of five TV series and 10 feature films, the “Star Trek” franchise is among the most fertile in the history of American entertainment. Another Paramount Pictures movie directed by J.J. Abrams is slated for release next December, this one a prequel about the original Enterprise crew, including Leonard Nimoy reprising his role as Spock.
But that’s a happy accident, according to the movers behind the tour, who believe the starship saga already has plenty of cultural warp speed behind it to propel their road show.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like it in my life,” says John Scher, president of Metropolitan Entertainment, the tour promoter. “This is a brand as deep or deeper than any entertainment brand I’ve ever seen.”
It’s a brand that still resonates based, in large part, on its continuing presence on TV: all five “Star Trek” series are currently in broadcast syndication or on national cable outlets.
Scher is figuring on drawing an audience beyond the diehard Trekkies. “We believe there’s a larger family audience who are mildly interested,” he says.
The tour will give Trekkies and the casually curious the full “Star Trek” treatment. They’ll be able to gawk at 650 assorted props and artifacts from the original series and have their pictures taken on the sets among superimposed images of the original crew.
They can also appear in a scene recreated from the series by reading a few lines in front of a green screen, be instantly edited into that scene and take it home on VHS or DVD for $24.95.
The tour includes four full-motion flight simulators and a 360-degree Encounter Theater that puts visitors in the middle of a battle with those bad-guy aliens, the Klingons.
“It’s a small, mobile theme park, extremely interactive and immersive,” says Martin Biallas CEO of SEE Touring Productions, the show’s producer. “As soon as you walk in, you’re a cadet in the Star Fleet Academy and away you go.”
The interactive experiences will include a chance to encounter members of the casts from the TV series, who will make appearances at each stop. That includes Capt. Kirk, with William Shatner slated to show up at some stops as the official celebrity ambassador.
A TV spot featuring Shatner will precede the tour’s arrival and he’ll also show up on local morning news shows. Billboards and online banner ads will be used to build anticipation.
The tour’s climax is a merchandising mecca, where Trekkies can buy Star Fleet uniforms for $20 to $40 and phasers in the $10 range, along with a potpourri of jewelry and other gewgaws, including an Enterprise bottle opener. Some of it has been designed for the tour and some was already being marketed by CBS, which holds licensing rights and share in merchandise profits.
SEE Touring licensed the rights for the tour from CBS, which gained the “Star Trek” right during the break-up with Viacom and Paramount.
Biallas expects merchandising — including those instant DVDs — and tickets to produce equal parts of the tour’s revenue. Tickets for the weekends — $35 for adults; $17.50 for kids — have already sold out for the Long Beach run.
Biallas, who also produced a “Titanic” tour, enjoyed success with a similar “Star Trek” tour that hit London in 2002, and also made stops in Dusseldorf, Vienna and Singapore a few years before that.
The audience was half Trekkies, he says, with a core aged 28 to 55, evenly divided between men and women.
The advent of the 11th “Star Trek” movie will open “a new marketing angle,” Bialas says, for the tour and a franchise he believes has lots of gas left in its futuristic tanks: “I think it will last another 40 years.”
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